The Web has profited greatly by the existence of tools that can follow
links from resource to resource without necessarily understanding all of
the semantics of the relationship. Google is the most obvious example
but it is not the only spider out there. There are also tools that allow
link checking, site replication, link visualization, and so forth.
In W3C specifications there are a variety of ways to link. HTML alone
uses several different attribute names. SOAP uses a bare-name convention
(even on elements in other namespaces). XLink is supposed to be used
across XML vocabularies but only vocabularies that are "document-like".
RDF uses another convention. XSLT and XML Schema link to inclusions
using yet another convention.
Does anybody else see this as a problem? Is it a TAG issue? An xml-core
issue? xml:href anybody? Is XLink supposed to be the solution? If not,
why not?
Paul Prescod